Next Steps

Once you've come up with a question, the first thing you want to do is brainstorm all the kinds of sources that you might be able to find to help you answer the question. You may decide to focus on one specific approach or you may want to bring in as many different kinds of sources as you can find, but you want to spend some time thinking through, searching (and perhaps consulting a librarian) about what kinds of sources exist to help you explore the question you've chosen. You want to think creatively and broadly so that you can get the most complete, well-rounded picture of the past as you can.

So what sources might we look for to try to answer our question about whether and how women's experiences during WWI affected their political views on helping Britain in the lead-up to World War II?

• We might start by looking for public writing, interviews, or memoirs by women who were anti-interventionists. Perhaps there are "human interest" newspaper articles that focus on some of these women and that explore why they got involved in the anti-intervention political movement. Maybe some of the women wrote memoirs or did oral histories that are available online.

• We could use JSTOR to explore whether any sociologists or psychologists in the late 1930s and early 1940s studied anti-interventionist groups and wrote about what motivated them or shaped their positions.

• We could look for the organizational records of one or more of the women's groups. Are any records available online or locally? Do the minutes of meetings or the materials the group produced give insight into their member's experiences during World War I? WorldCat (short for World Catalogue) is a great resource--it collects catalogue information from libraries around the country. If you know the name of an organization, you can use WorldCat to see which libraries have materials related to that organization. The WorldCat database is available through the Oberlin Library website.

• We could even get into the weeds with genealogical research--if we could find names of some of the women who joined these groups, we could trace them through census and military records to see how old they were during WWI, whether they lived in the US at the time or not, and whether they had a family member who fought or even died in the war.

This first step of looking for sources is about confirming the feasibility and answerability of your question and defining the approach you'll use to answer it. If you go looking and cannot find any sources that shed insight on the experiences of anti-interventionist women during World War I, then the question won't fly because it's not possible to answer. That may lead you back to the start of all this to come up with another question entirely.

But more likely, you'll find some interesting material and the next step is to refine your question.

Research, it is often said, is an "iterative process." Put simply, that means that you follow a series of steps that you repeat as you tweak and improve your final product. So you might find (indeed, you likely will find) that you need to tweak the question you started with after jumping into the sources. Perhaps your first investigations help you see that the question is too broad and needs to be narrowed further. Perhaps you found that the question is unanswerable because you can't find sources that would help you answer it. Perhaps in your investigation you discovered something really interesting that you now want to work into your research question. Like maybe you discovered in your initial research that the women in these anti-intervention groups didn't say a lot about World War I, but that many of them had emigrated from Europe (please note here that I have no idea if that is true--this is truly a hypothetical!) That might lead you to refine or rewrite your question to ask how and whether being a recent immigrant impacted American women's views on the conflict in Europe. Your question will likely evolve as your project does. That's good--as you learn new things, you may find new avenues of inquiry or a new or more tailored focus for your research.

For some reason, a lot of students find this one of the hardest steps of a research process. This might be called the "so what" step. It's where you as the researcher explain why your project matters. What is the significance of your particular study? Significance can be determined in lots of different ways. Perhaps your question is important because it might help settle a longstanding historical debate. Perhaps it's important because it will help us better understand some broader process or political development. Maybe it's significant because it will shed light on practices or behaviors that clarify how people in a particular time and place understood or navigated their world. But whatever its significance, you need to have a clear explanation in your own head of why your question is an important one to ask.

Here's an exercise that can help you go from topic, to question, to significance.

For this exercise, you fill in the blanks for your particular question:

I am studying ________________ (topic)

because I want to know ______________________ (question)

in order to help my readers understand __________________________ (significance)

So here's that this might look like for our example research question:

I am studying women who joined anti-interventionist groups before WWII

because I want to know whether their opposition to American involvement was motivated by their experiences or personal losses during WWI

in order to help my readers understand how personal experiences of trauma can affect foreign policy debates

See what I did there? Now I'm suggesting that my little paper on women in World War II might help us better understand a much bigger process, how trauma can affect someone's foreign policy views. That's significant, both because scholars should know the many different areas of someone's life that can be affected by trauma and because it may help us better understand the making of American foreign policy.

The final step, at least before doing all your research and developing your thesis, is to think through what kinds of scholarly conversations you want your work to participate in. Historians typically call this step the "historiographic review," where you figure out what historical work has been done on your topic and how your work relates to it. But you don't have to limit yourself to conversations with other historians. Indeed, if I were actually doing the research about women anti-interventionists that I've mapped out I would definitely want to consult the literature on war and trauma or on intergenerational transmission of trauma. I would look at what's been written on these women's organizations specifically, but might also decide to look at the more general literature on women's political activism in the interwar years to see where and how these women fit into a larger landscape.

Not all research projects require this step to the same extent. With a big project, you would start with the scholarly literature to see what scholars have already written about a topic you're interested in. That scholarly literature might then lead you to your own research question in a particular area. But if you are writing an 8-page research paper based on primary sources, you're not expected to come up with a completely new question or to immerse yourself deeply in the secondary source literature. But you will always want to contextualize your own work in some of the existing literature and for that, you need to have a sense of which scholarly conversations are most important to engage with.